> Making cars is really, really hard.

There's a HN meme of sorts that goes like "I can build that same website functionality in a weekend, why does company XYZ employ 5000 people to do it?!"

It's a recurring theme because there's some truth to it. Someone can indeed build the core functionality of that website in a weekend, if they ignore 99% of the difficult work of doing it in production and supporting customers and all the rest of the mundane but important parts.

Building a car isn't that hard really. Lots of people do one-off car build in their garage with basic tools and a shoestring budget. And they can build a fun car which works! Sure, it's not maintainable nor supportable but they built it and it works great.

So while Tesla is well past the guy in a garage stage, they are still at the stage of "building cars is really easy" (if you ignore all the maintainability and supportability and long tail of parts availability and everything else that established manufacturers know how to do).

Honestly, That's not good enough. In the car world you can recruit car engineers to fix simple car production problems. Objectively most of Tesla's issues are due to the poor fit and finish of the cabin and general fitment of things together. IF you ignore the whole electric engine and just treat it like and ice vehicle, Telsa should just be building on the knowledge of others and hiring Toyota engineers to help the nail things like delivery a simple service schedule. Making sure that cars roll of the line with everything tight and having spares ready for consumable parts.

It's not an acceptable excuse to shrug your shoulders and say that they're new at this. The concept of delivering a vehicle isn't new and Telsa has a TON of money.

Change the genre of product to Tech / software engineering. If Telsa was a software company shipping a crap product that broke all the time and then suddenly you found out that they didn't do XYZ of industry standard you'd hold them to account for not taking standard approaches to standard problems.

By that logic every prostitute runs a startup.

edit: (not really a great example, just wanted to play off of 'the world's oldest profession')

Better example would be calling Macy's a startup because Hudson's Bay Company was founded in the 1600s.